Seriously, a good chunk of what the US researches is done strictly because we don't question the defense budget and the contractors and bureaucrats know how to game the system and create jobs/fortunes for the defense industry.
As far as the whole "herp derp its not an icbm," well something tells me that if the Chinese had this and hit our carrier groups with it(1), we'd respond with nuclear strikes instantly. If we send 10 of these towards downtown Beijing, its nuclear war as usual fellas. I think the subtleties between kinetic and nuclear will be lost on the generals and leaders who make retaliatory strike decisions.
(1) The PRC is playing with all manner of kinetic kill vehicles and probably have a carrier killer mounted on several warships and subs, so this isn't purely conjecture
50 years ago someone might have made an argument that investing 380m in health care would be more useful than some crazy thing called 'ARPANET', but i think in the end it turned out better for everyone. Add GPS and self-driving cars to that list too.
Heck, the French had Minitel in the 80s while we had a loose network of BBS's and to be frank it wasn't the lack of network technologies that was the problem back then, it was the lack of a killer app. TBL delivered that in the form of the WWW. The WWW is network agnostic. There wasn't a day when people went "Whoa, T1s are now affordable for my LEC to sell to my ISP, I better get a shell account pronto!" It was "Whoa, there's email and colors and pictures and text and even video on my computer's modem via this thing called the web I'm seeing advertised on movie trailers and on product packaging?!?!"
Saying 'some other network would have evolved' is a cop-out: clearly that would have happened, but it would have happened later and that could have cost us in terms of competitiveness. Same argument for GPS, except even more likely given the heavy investment in infrastructure needed to even get a basic implementation running.
Also the 80's are not the 60's, it's ridiculous to think that the networking technologies were not influenced heavily by the work funded by the military ... hell the only reason killer apps could be created was because the technology was so pervasive that it made sense to write them.
And GPS, self-driving cars, and ARPANET are only what I came up with offhand because I was too lazy to check. Add ENIAC and radar to that list, both of which were developed specifically for military purposes but (obviously) later had wide-ranging practical civilian applications.
A lot? Some? Very little? Unless you have some backup here, the whole "HERP DERP EVERYTHING IMPORTANT IS FINANCED BY THE DOD" is wearing pretty thin.
http://www.defense.gov/releases/release.aspx?releaseid=13717
Also I didn't say everything important, I said a lot. In hindsight, I don't think anyone thinks funding ARPANET or ENIAC was a bad idea...
I think this is really impossible to quantify, but from a rational POV we can look at countries with small defense spending and see that they have healthy univerisities and healthy economies as well as healthy technological advances (again my example of the early french 'internet'). Tim Berners Lee was not only NOT an American but not funded by the DoD. His www application is what got the ball rolling. The network or protocol didn't matter, we can run http over anything. Same with Linus Torvalds, another non-American non-DOD funded star. We were sitting on nice networking tehcnology and wondering when Joe Public would see the wisdom of anything other than AOL and dialup (two very American things). It took a an Englishman at CERN and a Finnish student to give us WWW on Linux. Whats the Finnish defense budget look like?
A big bloaty DoD and the war on brown people is not a requirement for technological progress. If anything, it holds us back.
You're confusing procurement costs with R&D. Lumping all military spending together is ignoring the subtleties as to why and how the money is used:
http://www.thecollaredsheep.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/d...
* Tim Berners Lee got the ball rolling on www decades after the ARPANET investment, that doesn't help your point.
* The English have large military R&D spending, given their GDP, and always have.
The only advantage I can think of is the possibility of a return flight, but that only matters if reuse is economical vs an expendable vehicle (probably not), or if the cargo is "precious", i.e. a human. Given the prevalence of drone aircraft (including some that can stay airborne indefinitely), increasing capability of satellite optics, and literally decades of refinement on ICBMs, I'd have to say that this pursuit is more likely purely for research. (Of course, as a researcher you always have to "sell" your experiments to the decision makers with lines like "strike anywhere in under an hour".)
Improved missiles are now able to shoot down the U2, and maybe get close to the SR-71. That makes these planes a liability now, when over developed territories such as the former USSR.
Both were formerly useful, and have been brought out of retirement, when required for tasks that a satellite could not perform, or was not in position for.
I wouldn't be surprised if the x37 mini-spaceplane was primarily useful as a surveillance platform.
This has probably been true since at least 1960.
I wouldn't be surprised if the x37 mini-spaceplane was primarily useful as a surveillance platform.
Eh. It takes an Atlas V to launch the X-37.
At 90 million a launch, and months to prep, it's not exactly something one can crank out with a frag order on a day's notice.
The lifter rocket costs $50mil, so there are few targets in the world worth throwing this hardware at.
You got it. An ICBM would set off early warning alerts about a nuclear attack, prompting a possible counter-attack.